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Mussel Sauce
Open the required quantity of mussels, remove the dark spots found in the body parts, wash them well, and stew in water for about half an hour, seasoning with a blade of mace. Strain the liquor, return the mussels to it, bring it gently to a boil, remove from the fire, thicken with a liaison of flour and butter, add a small quantity each of cream and milk, and it is then ready for use.
A plain white sauce built on mussel liquor, of the sort a hotel kitchen would keep ready for poached fish. Two things need rethinking: the mussels themselves and the half-hour stew.
- The half-hour stewThirty minutes will turn mussel meat to gristle. Steam them in a covered pot with a little water until the shells open, 3 to 5 minutes, pull the meat out, then simmer the liquor with the mace for as long as you like to concentrate it. Return the meat only at the last minute to warm through.
- "The dark spots found in the body parts"Oscar probably means the dark digestive sac, and possibly the beard as well (the tough byssus threads that anchor the mussel). Pull the beard away with a firm tug toward the hinge. Modern rope-grown mussels are generally cleaner than the wild beds of Oscar's day and often need little more than a rinse.
- Sorting the musselsDiscard any that are cracked, or that stay gaping when tapped, before cooking; discard any that refuse to open after steaming. Buy them live and use them the day you buy them.
- StrainingStrain the liquor through a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or muslin. Even farmed mussels shed sand, and grit in a cream sauce is unrecoverable.
- A blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril that sheathes the nutmeg seed; equivalences vary, but a blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace. Ground mace works, but it cannot be fished out again, so add it sparingly.
- Liaison of flour and butterHere it most likely means beurre manie, kneaded cold in equal parts and whisked into the hot liquor off the boil, rather than a cooked roux. About 2 tablespoons each will thicken 2 cups of liquor to coating consistency. Simmer a couple of minutes afterward to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Cream and milkRoughly 1/4 cup cream and 1/4 cup milk per 2 cups of sauce keeps it from sliding into a chowder. Add it warm and do not let the sauce boil hard after the dairy goes in.
- SaltMussel liquor carries its own salt, and reducing it concentrates that. Season only at the very end, after tasting.
- Yield and useA quart of mussels in the shell yields roughly a cup of liquor and enough sauce for four servings. It is meant to be spooned over poached or baked white fish, or over the mussels themselves on toast.
Oscar Tschirky's book came out of the Waldorf's kitchens in the 1890s, when American hotel cooking was frankly French in method and the sauce chapters read as a working list of what a brigade needed on hand. Mussel sauce belongs to the family the French call sauce marinière or sauce aux moules — a fish-cookery sauce that gets its character not from stock but from the salty liquor the shellfish release when they open. Mussels were cheap in the period, which may help explain why a luxury hotel could use them as a flavoring for more expensive fish rather than serving them as the dish. The instruction to remove "the dark spots" and wash them well reflects an era before rope cultivation, when a mussel came out of tidal mud and had to be dealt with accordingly.